OAN Staff Katherine Mosack
9:00 AM – Thursday, August 21, 2025
The contentious congressional map supported by Texas Republicans has been passed and is now headed straight to Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s office.
Early on Saturday, the Texas Senate gave its final approval to the map that contains five new congressional districts that lean Republican.
In a brief statement following the map’s passage on Saturday, Governor Abbott (R-Texas) expressed his support for this new move, promising his signature while referring to President Donald Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill.”
“The One Big Beautiful Map has passed the Senate and is on its way to my desk, where it will be swiftly signed into law,” said Governor Abbott. “I promised we would get this done, and delivered on that promise. I thank Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick for leading the passage in the Senate of a bill that ensures our maps reflect Texans’ voting preferences.”
President Trump has also supported the redrawn districts to help maintain the GOP’s majority in Congress in anticipation of the 2026 midterm elections. On Wednesday, he celebrated the Texas GOP lawmakers’ efforts after the Lone Star State’s Senate first announced the bill’s approval.
“Big WIN for the Great State of Texas!!! Everything Passed, on our way to FIVE more Congressional seats and saving your Rights, your Freedoms, and your Country, itself. Texas never lets us down,” the president wrote on Truth Social.
Democrats in Texas have zealously combatted the redrawing of the congressional map. In protest, many left-leaning legislators fled the legislature and the state, creating a two-week hold that prevented the Republicans’ plans from moving forward. Upon their return, the Democrats were required to sign permission slips to accept police escorts to ensure they returned for the approval of the bill, guaranteeing a quorum in the Texas Senate.
Representative Nicole Collier (D-Texas) was among the Democrat leaders who argued that a new map would be discriminatory against racial minorities in the state by preventing “black and brown individuals from selecting the candidates of their choice.” Her justification for fleeing the state was that “during slavery, blacks fled.”
Democrat leaders outside of Texas are also fighting the Republicans’ efforts. Most notably, California Governor Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.) launched his own plan in early August to redraw the Golden State’s congressional maps.
“This is not something six weeks ago that I ever imagined that I’d be doing,” Newsom lamented at the time. “This is a reaction to an assault on our democracy in Texas.”
The California governor plans to cancel out Texas’s new Republican seats by reworking his state’s map to include five new Democrat-leaning House seats. Newsom’s approach is to “fight fire with fire.”
Though California Assemblyman and Republican minority leader James Gallagher (R-Calif.) has condemned Trump’s push for new Republican seats, he worried that Newsom’s strategy could be dangerous.
“You move forward fighting fire with fire, and what happens?” Gallagher asked. “You burn it all down.”
Indeed, the redistricting maps in Texas and California have lit a fire throughout the country, and several other states have also shown their interest in reworking their congressional districts, backed by the president. The red-leaning list so far includes: Missouri, Florida, Indiana, and Kansas. Ohio, which had 10 red districts out of 15 in the 2024 election, has a state law that also mandates new maps before the 2026 midterms.
If these states followed in Texas’s footsteps, it may boost Trump’s ultimate plan of picking up “100 more seats.”
“More seats equals less Crime, a great Economy, and a STRONG SECOND AMENDMENT,” Trump said on Truth Social. “It means Happiness and Peace.”
However, as Gallagher warned, Democratic leaders are not going down without a fight, and several blue-leaning states are also looking to redraw maps. Aside from California, the list includes New York, Wisconsin, and Maryland.
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